I was flipping through a friend’s copy of Dungeon Delve and took the opportunity to read through the introduction by Bill Slavicsek, the Director of R&D at WotC. He starts by describing the successful Dungeon Delves that WotC has run at various conventions over the past decade:

But from the opening of the show on Thursday, we knew we had found the crux of a winning formula. (…) The fans ate it up. We had enormous lines at the Delve that entire weekend. They lined up to get into the available party slots. They lined up to witness the action and see whether Monte Cook or Bruce Cordell or Ed Stark (or whoever else was part of the team at that time) could kill more characters as more and more of the Delve was revealed. They lined up to see the next dungeon details and character names get posted to the bulletin board. How far had they gotten? What had they killed? Who didn’t make it out of the last fight?

They had a winning format: A megadungeon serving as the shared campaign setting for a huge pool of players. They basically took core Old School play and condensed it down to a format that could be played rapid-fire over the couse of a convention weekend.

Nifty stuff.

With this book, the Dungeon Delve concept finally takes center stage as a core D&D product. It was a long time coming, but we needed that time to test concepts, try out new formats, and eventually get to the point where this product was not only viable, but in many ways necessary to the evolution of the D&D game.

This makes perfect sense. If you’re in the business of selling RPGs and you’ve got something that’s a proven success with RPG players, you should try to figure out how to bottle that success and sell it to the masses.

For the purpose of this product, a Dungeon Delve is a compact series of encounters appropriate for a specific level of play. This book contains 30 Dungeon Delves, one for each level of play. Each Delve features three encounters, forming a mini-adventure of sorts.

Wait… what?

So you had a format: Megadungeon. High mortality rate attracting lots of attention. Boatloads of players/characters sharing a single setting to create a sense of competition, rivalry, and shared accomplishment.

And your method of bringing this format to “center stage as a core D&D product” is to give us mini-dungeons featuring three encounters incapable of serving as a shared campaign setting in a system explicitly designed for low mortality rates?

WTF?

(And is it even possible for them to devalue the term “core” any more? Describing their splat books as “core” was bad enough, but now they’re actually claiming that their adventure modules are “core” products? Exactly what do you produce that isn’t a “core” product, WotC?)

Let me be clear here: There’s nothing wrong with either style of adventure. I think there’s room in any good campaign for both megadungeons and mini-adventures. I contributed mini-adventures to Atlas Games’ En Route II. My Mini-Adventure 1: Complex of Zombies is pretty much in the same ballpark. I haven’t actually taken a close look at the actual adventures in Dungeon Delve, but conceptually it’s an interesting and potentially useful product.

But what baffles me is a company saying, “Our goal is to do X. And in order to do X, we’re going to do not-X.”

I mean, there are many parts of the design of 4th Edition which followed that pattern: The designers say that they want to do X and then they release mechanics which either don’t do X or do the exact opposite of X.

I had simply assumed that was incompetence. But maybe that’s just the way that Slavicsek and his design team think. (Which would also explain why we got not-D&D when they tried to design D&D.)

This material is covered by the Open Gaming License.

A character can choose to push the limits of their normal abilities in exchange for the character suffering some fatigue from the effort. Immediately after using extra effort, a character becomes fatigued (-2 Strength, -2 Dexterity, cannot run), even if they are normally immune to fatigue. If a character uses extra effort while fatigued they become exhausted (-6 Strength, -6 Dexterity, one-half speed). If a character uses extra effort while exhausted they become unconscious.

A character using extra effort can gain one of the following benefits for a single round:

Activate Class Ability: Gain an additional use of a class ability that has a limited number of uses per day.

Desperate Parry: As an immediate action, gain the the benefits of fighting defensively (or using the Combat Expertise feat) against one attack. If the character was already fighting defensively (or using the Combat Expertise feat), double the bonus gained.

Desperate Speed: Move at double speed for one round or take an additional 5 foot step.

Emulate Feat: Benefit from a feat they don’t have for 1 round. The character must meet the prerequisites of the feat.

Emulate Metamagic: The character can use a metamagic feat they don’t have or don’t have prepared. This increases the casting time of the spell to at least a full round unless using the Quicken Spell feat. A caster with prepared spells must use up a prepared spell of the appropriate level, but can keep the original spell being modified. A spontaneous caster can use extra effort to use a metamagic feat they do know without increasing the casting time of the spell.

Extra Attack: When performing the full attack action, make 1 extra attack at their highest base attack bonus.

Focused Skill Check: Take 10 on a skill check even when they normally couldn’t.

Opportunist: Take an extra attack of opportunity.

Prodigious Strength: Double their carrying capacity for one round or gain a +2 bonus to a single Strength check (or Strength-based skill).

Spell Boost: A caster can use extra effort to gain a +2 bonus to their effective caster level for a single spell. (Must declare before casting the spell.)

Turn the Blow: Automatically negate an opponent’s critical hit (turning it into a normal hit).

Vicious Blow: Automatically confirm a critical without making an additional attack roll. (Must be declared before checking the crit.)

EXHAUSTING EFFORT

A character performing an exhausting effort suffers from exhaustion. If a character is fatigued when performing an exhausting effort, they become unsconsious. Exhausted characters cannot attempt an exhausting effort.

Intense Skill Check: The character can Take 20 on a physical skill check without expending any additional time on the check and even in circumstances where they normally couldn’t.

Recall Spell: Spellcasters who prepare their spells can use exhausting effort to recall any spell previously cast on the same day. The spell can be cast again with no effect on other prepared spells. Spontaneous spellcasters can use extra effort to cast a spell without using one of their daily spell slots.

Second Effort: The character can reroll any one die roll and use whichever result is better.

DESIGN NOTES

The Extra Effort mechanics serve a function similar to Action Points. One key difference is that while Action Points are a dissociated mechanic, the Extra Effort mechanics are associated: They specifically model that moment when a character digs deep and finds the inner reserves necessary to do what must be done.

The specific list of benefits that a character can gain from Extra Effort should be considered a sampler. Players should be encouraged to propose their own, situation-specific benefits from Extra Effort.

In judging whether or not a particular benefit is appropriate, I propose a simple spot-check: If it’s appropriate for a 2nd-level spell, then it’s appropriate for extra effort. If it’s appropriate for a 4th-level spell, then it’s appropriate for an exhausting effort.

The rationale for this is simple: Fatigue can be removed with lesser restoration (a 2nd-level spell) and exhaustion can be removed with restoration (a 4th-level spell). Therefore, in a worst case scenario, the system can’t be abused any farther than a character using extra effort and then immediately wiping it out with a 2nd-level spell or using exhausting effort and then immediately wiping it out with a 4th-level spell.

In playtesting, for example, exhaustive efforts were created when the Recall Spell ability proved too powerful: Characters were getting the benefit of a mnemonic enhancer spell for the use of a lesser restoration spell. Mnemonic enhancer, however, is a 4th-level spell — so if characters want to use a 4th-level restoration spell to more-or-less mimic the effect of another 4th-level spell, I’ve got no problem with that.

With this novel, Brust seems to have lost the unique voice of Vlad Taltos. Instead of the clever wittiness of previous volumes, the Vlad of this book is merely sardonic and shrill. There’s also an oddly anachronistic tone in a patter drawn with distinctly 20th century rhthyms and tone.

This loss may have something to do with the fact that Brust is, once again, jumping back to a much earlier time in Vlad’s life. He handled this back-and-forth movement of the meta-narrative adroitly in the past, but the Vlad that we had last seen in Orca had been deeply transformed. Brust wouldn’t be the first author to demonstrate that, sometimes, you just can’t go home again.

The other failings of the book are less understandable, perhaps, but might ultimately have the same origin: If Brust was struggling to find young Vlad’s voice, that inauthentic note can very easily spread to other aspects of the work.

Notably there’s a narrative bloat coupled with a lack of focus. There’s lots of stuff on the page here that doesn’t seem to serve any real purpose and a lot of it is authorial meandering of the worst type. (“I’m going to talk about my inability to cook a particular type of bread because I’ve got a word count to hit by Friday and I don’t know what else to write just now.”)

Even the non-traditional narrative structure doesn’t work. It’s not actually being used to accomplish any specific effect (unlike the similar structure used in Taltos). So it just comes off as gimmicky and trite. In fact, the novel probably would have been better without this cheap trick. (In Taltos the same technique improved the novel because the structure reinforced the themes of the book and gave wider context to the individual events.)

In the case of Dragon, Brust tries to blatantly tell you that he’s giving you wider context. But, in actual practice, he just deflates the entire plot: The fact that you know what’s going to happen long before it happens just adds an even larger sense of bloat to the mild bloat which is already dragging the novel down.

It should also be noted that things generally improve as the novel continues, feeling almost as if Brust was warming up to his subject. In the end, however, I found this to be the weakest of the Taltos novels.

GRADE: C+

Steven Brust
Published: 1998
Publisher: Ace
Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0812589165
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Dave Arneson passed at 11 pm last night.

I can’t really think of anything to say that I didn’t say two days ago. Instead, let me simply call for a moment of digital silence in the memory of a great man.

Reading Orca is a somewhat surreal experience right now. Written in 1996, it nevertheless feels as if it should have a “RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES OF TODAY!” blurb blazoned across its cover.

In my reaction to Jhereg, I described the novel as: “A pulp detective novel by Raymond Chandler, except that the main character is an assassin instead of a private detective and his seedy office is in a world of high fantasy instead of the 1940s.”

Orca, on the other hand, is just a flat-out pulp detective novel. It feels like Chinatown played out across the financial headlines of today in a world of high fantasy.

And, much like Jhereg, that’s pretty much as cool as it sounds.

Orca also continues Athyra‘s approach of using non-Vlad points of view to tell the story. I have two thoughts on this:

First, Brust makes this approach work in Orca for reasons completely different than what made it work in Athyra. In Orca the technique is used to show us Vlad from the angle of one who knows him not at all.l In Athyra, Brust uses the technique to show us Vlad from the angle of one who knows him very well… and in the process reveals a lot about both Vlad and the narrator.

Second, there is a very deliberate effect being created in choosing to tell the story of this portion of Vlad’s life through the eyes of others. There is, in fact, a layering of narratives: The story is being told to a very specific character (Cawti) by another character (Kiera); and as she narrates to Cawti, Kiera also re-tells parts of the tale which were only told to her by Vlad.

So while some portions are, at first glance, still being narrated by Vlad in a traditional fashion, even that narrative is being filtered through a second point of view.

Unreliable narrators are often used for cheap effect. But there’s nothing cheap — or simple — about what Brust is accomplishing here.

GRADE: B+

Steven Brust
Published: 1996
Publisher: Ace
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0441001963
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